When Empathy for One Subject Unbalances a Story
Launch library · evergreen read
Spending extended time with a subject, hearing their account in detail and coming to understand their perspective, naturally builds empathy, but that empathy can quietly tilt a story toward one side when other people involved receive far less careful, humanising attention in direct comparison to the central figure.
This imbalance often shows up structurally rather than in any single dishonest sentence, one person's motivations are explored thoughtfully while another's are simply stated, one person's mistakes are contextualised while another's are left to stand starkly alone on the page without that same careful, humanising context applied.
Noticing this pattern requires deliberately checking how much narrative care has actually been extended to each person in a story, rather than assuming that because every individual fact is accurate, the overall portrait must therefore be fair to everyone involved in the story. Reading a draft specifically with this question in mind, rather than simply checking each fact in isolation, is often the only way this kind of quiet imbalance actually becomes visible.